The Shadow of Sumitro

 

Sometimes, the dead don’t stay buried. Sometimes, they live on in the bones and blood of their children, whispering in the dark corners of political ambition.

In the suffocating heat of August 2025, when Jakarta’s smog hung like a funeral shroud over the archipelago, The Economist—that cold, British voice of reason—delivered a diagnosis that cut deep into the Indonesian psyche. President Prabowo Subianto, they claimed, suffered from what the psychology textbooks called “daddy issues.” But this wasn’t some college freshman’s relationship drama. This was the kind of father-haunting that could reshape a nation of 280 million souls.

You see, in the twisted family tree of Indonesian politics, the roots run deep and dark. Prabowo’s story began not with triumph, but with exile—the kind of childhood that marks a boy like a brand burned into cattle hide. Before his sixth birthday had even arrived, little Prabowo was already learning what it meant to run. Not from monsters under the bed, but from the very real consequences of his father’s choices.

Sumitro Djojohadikusumo. Even the name carried weight, like stones in a dead man’s pockets. The father was brilliant—one of those razor-sharp intellects that could dissect an economy with the precision of a coroner’s scalpel. Professor, politician, idealist. The kind of man who believed he could remake the world if only he could find the right levers to pull.

But brilliance, as any resident of Dodge City could tell you, often comes with a price.

The boy followed his father like a shadow follows its owner—inevitable, inseparable, sometimes stretching long and distorted in the dying light. Singapore first, in a cramped apartment where the tropical heat pressed against the windows like sweating palms. Then Hong Kong, to that small flat on McDonald Road, where the neon signs blinked their electric prayers into the night and young Prabowo learned that home was whatever country would have them this week.

Much smarter than me, Prabowo would say decades later, his voice carrying that particular tone men use when speaking of fathers who loom too large in memory. The kind of admission that might sound like humility but carries the sharp edge of something else—longing, maybe, or the weight of expectations that never quite fit right, like a borrowed coat that’s either too big or too small.

Malaysia, Switzerland, England—the boy collected countries like other children collected baseball cards, each move another lesson in impermanence. By the time he graduated from the American School in London in 1967, Prabowo had learned the most fundamental truth about power: it was always temporary, always slipping through your fingers like smoke from a dying cigarette.

The Economist article was clinical in its assessment, dissecting Prabowo’s policies—the Free Nutritious Meals program, the Merah-Putih Cooperative, Danantara—like specimens pinned to a board. All of it, they suggested, was simply the son trying to fulfill the father’s interrupted dreams. The ghost of Sumitro, still dictating policy from beyond the political grave.

But here’s what those buttoned-up British analysts missed, what they couldn’t understand from their sterile London offices: sometimes the ghosts we carry aren’t hauntings at all. Sometimes they’re inheritances.

Brother Hashim—oh, Hashim knew. He’d been there too, after all, another boy caught in Sumitro’s gravitational pull. When he told CNN about Prabowo’s confession—“I can carry out our father’s programs, I can realize his visions and dreams”—his words carried the weight of shared understanding. This wasn’t pathology; this was family obligation written in blood and political destiny.

The international press loves these narratives, these neat psychological boxes they can stuff world leaders into. Biden with his father complex, Bush Jr. trying to outshine Bush Sr., Trump with his own paternal shadows dancing behind his every tweet and rally cry. It’s easier that way, isn’t it? Reduce the complex machinery of political motivation to simple daddy issues, as if the fate of nations could be explained by a few sessions on a psychiatrist’s couch.

But in the steamy, complicated archipelago of Indonesia, where politics is personal and the personal is always political, the truth runs deeper than any magazine article could hope to plumb. This isn’t about some Freudian obsession or psychological wound that never healed properly. This is about a boy who spent his childhood learning that principles matter more than comfort, that sometimes you have to run from your own country to preserve your integrity, that brilliance without courage is just another form of cowardice.

Reagan, they said, had daddy issues too—raised by a drunk, shaped by the constant need to read the emotional temperature of every room he entered. But look what that hypervigilance gave him: the ability to sense exactly what people needed to hear, when they needed to hear it. The skill to navigate the treacherous waters of American politics with an actor’s instinct for timing and effect.

The darkness in these family stories isn’t in the influence itself—it’s in what happens when that influence goes unexamined, when the ghost in the machine starts making decisions for the living. When a president’s policies become less about serving the people and more about settling old scores or fulfilling promises made to a father who’ll never live to see them kept.

Somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of the presidential palace in Jakarta, does Prabowo still hear his father’s voice? When he signs legislation or approves budgets, is he the President of Indonesia, or is he still that exiled boy, finally old enough and powerful enough to finish what his brilliant, idealistic father started?

The people of Indonesia—270 million of them, from Sabang to Merauke—they’re the ones who’ll find out. They’re the ones living inside this particular ghost story, whether they know it or not.

And in the suffocating heat of another Jakarta night, as the city sprawls beneath its blanket of smog and ambition, one truth remains as constant as the tropical sun: the dead may be gone, but they’re never really finished with us. They live on in the policies we craft, the dreams we chase, and the shadows we cast when we finally step into the light of power.

Sometimes a daddy complex is just a daddy complex. But sometimes—sometimes it’s the engine that drives history itself.

The real question isn’t whether Prabowo has daddy issues. The real question is whether Indonesia can survive them.